We had to wake up early to catch the bus for our boat excursion. We had to eat breakfast at the hotel very fast, and I was unable to finish my boiled eggs, so I took them with me in my pocket. We were able to catch the bus no problem, which took us back to the new port at the souther part of the island where we had first arrived via the ferry. The scene at the port was fairly chaotic. We ran off the bus and were trying to get a ticket from one of the people walking around with a clipboard. It seemed like a bunch of tour buses were converging on a set of communal ships that were shared amongst all the tour operators. The ships looked like faux pirate ships. The main aim of the clipboard people was to get the tourist onto a boat with a tour guide that spoke their language. It seemed like tour guides spoke a minimum of 2, but usually around 3-4 languages. For instance the boat we ended up on had a English/Spanish/Italian tour guide and all the announcements were in each of the three languages.
We got onto an almost full boat and trouble finding a place to sit. We ended up squeezing into a three person bench. My but was half dangling off the side. It was at this point that I pulled out the boiled egg from my pocket. Lizy looked at me with a mixture of disgust and embarrassment, but I didn’t care. It was a perfectly delicious boiled egg.
Our first stop was the volcano. Santorini is sort of a crescent moon type shape. If you complete the circle, you get a sense of what the original island shape was before it broke up in a volcanic explosion. The current volcano is in the centre of the completed disk.
Everyone got off the boat and started walking up a path that snaked it’s way up the volcano. The path consisted of little pebbles, that almost looked like they were imported because it seemed like off the path the volcano’s surface was mostly loose ash. There were other faux pirate ship groups that were coming down the volcano at the same time and when we left there were new faux pirate ship groups coming onto the volcano.
Now I’ll describe the way the tours operated. Each tour guide would gather their group at a set location along the path. They would give a speech in one of their group’s languages. Our tour guide, Gabrielle, always gave his first speech in English. After finishing the speech, the tour guide would tell that language group to walk to the next checkpoint, while they immediately broke into the speech in the next language. After they finished up with all the languages the tour guide would run up the path to meet up with the first group and begin the next series of speeches. It seemed like an exhausting job, running up the volcano in the blistering heat, and I imagine it would get only hotter in the summer.
At the first checkpoint, there was a sign explaining the different eruptions that had caused the different segments of the volcanic island to form. The second stop, we looked at some sulfuric gas seeping from one of the volcano’s craters. I was reminded of visiting Lassen in California where you could see the gas seeping from the pools of sulfur. The final checkpoint was at the top of the volcano. I could see the faux pirate ships streaming from Santorini to the volcano. At this stop, our tour guide told us about how some people believe that Santorini could be the lost city of Atlantis. The disaster, first described by Plato, that destroyed Atlantis could have been referring to the initial volcanic explosion that destroyed the Minoan settlement on the island. If you go back to the original Plato dialogue the timing of the destruction of Atlantis could feasibly correspond to the volcanic blast.
The two main counter arguments to such a claim are one that the Santorini is not in the Atlantic Ocean, the only specific geographical information given by Plato of the island and, two, that Santorini was destroyed by a Volcanic blast, but Plato says Atlantis is destroyed either by a flood or an earthquake.
I was not a believer of the theory, but I tend to be a naysayer.
The walk down the volcano was easier than up and soon we were off to the next stop on the boat tour. Near another small fragment of the original Santorini we docked to swim in sulfuric hot springs. The water was saturated with an orangey substrate that stained our bathing suits. Some of the other tourists assumed that all weird mud must equal healing properties, maybe they had just come back from a spa on the dead sea. This subset rubbed their body all over with the orangey mud that settled at the bottom of the water.
Calling them hot springs is a little bit of a stretch. They were more like warm springs. Still interesting. We didn’t rub any mud on ourselves, in fact after seeing people rubbing themselves in mud it had the opposite of an inspirational effect on Lizy, who started to think the orangey substrate made the water dirty, so we headed back in the boat.
Next, we sailed to the second largest fragment of the original Santorini. There were a few restaurants at the harbour. You could also climb up a bunch of stairs up the cliff face of the caldera to see the small town. We decided to eat lunch at one of the restaurants. As we ate our lunch, there were subsequent waves of pirate boats docking and all the restaurants in the little harbour filled up with people.
After lunch, we reboarded our boat and sailed back to our fragment of Santorini. On the way back the boat traveled parallel to the coast along the caldera. We sailed from Oia, in the north, all the way to the port on the southernmost tip of Santorini. I felt we were getting the best view of the caldera, which was arguably the reason to go to Santorini. Gabrielle, our tour guide, played Spanish music which was loved by the mostly Spanish tourists on our vessel.
Once we got back to our hotel we were exhausted from the great day. We went for a final swim on the beach near our hotel and then on our walk back to our hotel room we ordered dinner at the bar to be delivered to our room. We ate our dinner on our balcony.
“You know I kind of think the view of the sunset from our room is better than Oia,” Lizy said to me.
“You can’t even see the sun from the beach side of the island. It’s already behind the hill.”
“Ya but who needs to look directly at the sun. I’m already cozy in my pyjamas eating dinner. I can see the color in the sky.”
“But, we spent so much time driving and getting ready for the sunset at Oia. It’s a world famous sunset.”
“Ya, but I guess more than any of those things it really made me appreciate this sunset, where I’m sitting alone with you.”
The next morning we said goodbye to Niko, stuffed our suitcases, and headed to the airport, driven again by trusty Orestes.
He looked at us in the mirror and said, “What did I tell you. Three days is enough to see everything.”
